Showdown in Wisconsin — middle class on the fault line

Protests at the Wisconsin state capitol are drawing the lines of a national debate on the role of government in Americans’ lives.

Republicans, who seek to achieve a certain level of spending cuts, have cast as villains the middle-class state employees who are struggling to keep their jobs and place in American society.

This debate, played out on television across the land, is at the heart of the middle class concerns. We can’t afford to lose the middle class jobs that government provides but we balk at taxes to pay the salaries and benefits of those jobs. Cut the spending and we lose more middle class jobs. In many ways, unions speak for those concerns.

If the Wisconsin governor gets his way and state laws are enacted to strip most public employees of their collective bargaining rights, will the middle class lose its voice?